This invention relates to communication systems and more particularly to a communication system for communicating between hospital room patients and a central nurses' station.
Many hospitals, because of communication problems, do not use their personnel (primarily nurses) in the most efficient manner. The present preferred way of best utilizing a nurse's time is for one or more nurses to be stationed at a central nurses station. From this station, the nurse services a floor, a wing, or a plurality of rooms of a hospital, depending upon the size and layout of the hospital, by continuously rotating through the rooms assigned to her to check on "her" patient's condition. This method of operation has several disadvantages. It requires that the nurse be constantly moving and, thus, is physically exhausting. In addition, a nurse may be checking on one patient when an emergency occurs to another patient, and, thus, she may not be alerted in time to assist the patient with the emergency. To alleviate this undesirable situation, most hospitals have installed what is commonly known as a "nurse call" system. such a system provides a means of signal communication between a patient and a nurse located at a central station. In addition, such a system usually provides two-way audio communication between the nurse and the patient. While these systems somewhat improve the communication between a nurse and her patients, they are not entirely satisfactory for a variety of reasons.
Generally speaking, "nurse call" systems do not include different levels of urgency. Hence, the nurse receiving a call does not know whether a call is an emergency call or a non-emergency call. Thus, she must immediately communicate with the patient to determine the nature of the call. If she receives several different calls at one time, she is in a quandary and may miss an emergency call while checking out non-emergency calls.
Nurse call systems are also inadequate because they do not allow a patient to visually view the nurse while orally communicating with her. While oral communications are adequate in some situations, in other situations, it is desirable that the nurse be able to demonstrate visually to the patient one or more of her instructions. If she has no visual communication with the patient, she must walk to the patient's room to provide the necessary visual information.
Another area wherein "nurse call" systems are inadequate relates to their inability to carry information from sensors attached to the patient to either the nurse or to remote recording and analyzing equipment. Hence, localized analyzing and recording equipment must be available near each patient or, as has been suggested in some cases, provision must be made to transmit sensed information from the patient to a remote recording and analyzing device.
With respect to wires, hospital walls contain literally hundreds of wires. Power wires and RF video wires for TV sets located in patient rooms, wires for the nurse call system referred to above, telemetry wires and wires for communication between patients and the nurses stations are all contained in hospital walls. It will be appreciated that it would be desirable to eliminate as many of these wires as possible and utilize only a minimum number of wires to carry a plurality of information signals.
While some attempts have been made to reduce the number of wires in hospital walls for communication and other purposes they have not been entirely successful. Examples of prior art systems proposing solutions to this and other hospital communication problems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,423,521, 3,517,120 and 3,534,161. While the systems described in these patents appear to improve hospital communications over a simple nurse call system, they still have disadvantages. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,517,120 utilizes a complicated oscillator arrangement to notify the nurse at the nurses station that communication is desired. In addition, at the nurses station, there is a means for sensing oscillations at predetermined frequencies to control indicating lights. Such an arrangement is undesirable because oscillators must be tuned and maintained at predetermined frequencies. In addition, detectors must be maintained so that they will detect predetermined frequencies. All these requirements lead to a relatively complicated nurse call arrangement. The other patents (U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,423,521 and 3,534,161) noted above disclose relatively complicated systems for determining exactly which one of a plurality of patients is attempting to communicate with the nurses station. Because of their complexity, such arrangements are expensive to manufacture and install. In addition, because they include a large number of components, they are less reliable than a system using a smaller number of components.
Therefore, it is an object of this invention to provide a new and improved communication system.
It is also an object of this invention to provide a hospital communication system that includes a provision for a patient calling a nurse at a nurses station on either an emergency or a non-emergency basis.
It is another object of this invention to provide a communication system suitable for allowing a patient to view a nurse at a nurses station while the patient is communicating with the nurse.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a new and improved hospital communication system that includes a single coaxial connector for carrying a variety of signals between a patient and a nurse located at a nurses station.
It is a still further object of this invention to provide a new and improved hospital communication system that utilizes the TV receiver which is normally located in a patient's room as a means of visually communicating between a patient and a nurse regardless of whether or not the TV set is energized when communication commences.
It is yet another object of this invention to provide an uncomplicated system for signaling between a patient and a nurse located at a nurses station.
It is a still further object of this invention to provide a nurse call system combined with a communication system that utilizes DC as the basis for the nurse call system.